PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (32 page)

“How could someone test for a medium unless they had a ghost in their kit?” Jacob said.

I took up the line of reasoning. “And how could they test for a psychic shield unless they had a reliable Psych hanging around for him to shut down?”

Jacob pulled up a chair, rotated it so it faced me, sat down, and pulled my hand into his lap. He worked my fingers and palm in his strong, warm hands, and stared into my face so earnestly I thought one of us was going to start blubbering. I’m not sure who.

“Zigler tried to quit,” I said.

“Quit what?”

“Quit being a PsyCop.”

Jacob stroked my hand with his thumb. “What happened?”

“I found something at LaSalle.” I swallowed hard. “In the basement. Fuck, it was one of the worst ghosts I’d ever seen. It lit up the whole room with ghostfire.” I shuddered. “And Zig…he read my expression, I guess. He figured that if I was spooked, he didn’t want any part of it.”

Jacob gave a low whistle. “I didn’t see that coming. So what would you expect him to do?”

“Well, he….” I stopped, and thought. What
had
I expected from him?

“What could either of you do?”

“I could get rid of it.”

Jacob stared me in the eye.

“Exorcise it,” I said. Even though it had been obvious what I’d meant, it seemed like it was important that I use the technical term, even though it meant admitting that I knew what I was doing, sometimes.

Jacob sat back and stroked his goatee. “You’re serious. I thought you’d been studying up to get rid of repeaters.”

I stared down at the sea of books, and the words all ran together. “If Einstein could do it, Richie, I mean—the guy’s a level three, if even that—then I should be able to do it, too. I saw him fade a suicide out of existence with a few Hail Marys. So if there’s a big, nasty, psycho fire-ghost in the hospital, and its negative vibes are killing patients, I’ve got to at least try to flush it out.”

Mind you, I was fully aware that my own logic didn’t quite jibe with the advice I’d once given Lisa. I’d told her that she wasn’t responsible for eradicating every last evil in the world, just because she had the gift of
si-no
.

Maybe the fire ghost was out of my league, and if so, it didn’t seem too bright to put myself in danger, if I could walk away instead.

On the other hand, it was actually my case. My job.

“I’ll help you,” Jacob said.

I wanted to say no. It wasn’t his responsibility, it was mine. And he didn’t see that spirit,
feel
it deep down in his core, get a sense of how twisted and wrong it actually was. I wanted to tell him that, but I didn’t. Because it wouldn’t have made any difference. Jacob had something to prove—to himself, to me. And he intended to prove it.

-THIRTY ONE-

Jacob emerged from our basement with cobwebs in his hair, and a battered, red spiral-bound notebook in his hand. I took the notebook from him and flipped it open. Anarchy symbols. My handwriting from when I was twenty-four looked different than it did now. Neater. And I pressed harder back then, too, leaving impressions of my writing on the page beneath. I still left my o’s open on top and crossed my t’s crooked and to the right, but now I had a looser, easier scrawl that didn’t eat into the pages below.

I flipped toward the center of the notebook, wondering if some of the notes covered up impressions of the sex fantasy I’d written for Stefan fourteen years ago. Forensics could probably scan the book and recover it from the impressions I’d left in the paper. I might’ve been blushing a little, but if Jacob noticed, he probably chalked it up to the excitement of the ghost hunt.

“I think candles would help,” I said. Because although I was primarily visual, I remembered how the cinnamon sugar had turbocharged my powers, and I though a few basic props were in order if I was going to pay another visit to that scary-assed ghost. “Salt, too. And…” I was being facetious with this last part, “do we have any rue?”

“Crash left a bag of supplies here when he did the house blessing.”

Lo and behold, we did indeed have rue. And charcoal, with Crash’s signature resin, copal, to burn on top of it. We had sage smudge sticks and a Baggie of fuzzy green stuff that I couldn’t quite place until I dipped my fingers into it and felt it. Mugwort. Drinkable, as an infusion. Supposedly grants prophetic dreams—in other words, a natural psyactive. A half-dozen white candles, too, tied in a bundle with a red ribbon. Red and white. Protection. And if I shifted my vision while I looked at them, they seemed to give off a subtle glow, even unlit. I figured they’d been activated by Crash.

There was even a prepackaged container of “Double Cross” incense. It looked like it was manufactured by the same company that made the High John soap, the one that had given me a rash. I set that aside. Instinctively, I trusted more in simple ingredients that I activated myself than I did in factory-made blends. Or maybe that wasn’t instinct talking at all. Maybe it was training.

“This ghost looked pretty strong,” I said, “and I’m thinking it’s had its hooks sunk into LaSalle for fifty, maybe sixty, years now. We need to be careful.”

Jacob nodded.

“So…boil some water. It’s tea time.”

While Jacob got the mugwort started, I scooped some sidewalk salt out of the bag in the vestibule, funneled white light into it until it glowed, then scattered it around our downstairs bathroom. I put an incense burner full of smoldering copal on the countertop, and I burned one of the activated white candles.

The room felt right.

I hung a clean suit on the hook inside the bathroom door while I showered, so the smoke and the steam and the protective vibes could permeate it while I washed the stink of the day, both physical and spiritual, from my body.

Jacob came in with our tea while I was soaping up for the fifth time. He put the cups beside the sink and started to strip.

“Uh-uh, we shower separately,” I told him. “You’ve got to save your mojo. You’ll need it.”

He slid the shower door open a crack and leaned against the pastel-colored tiles. “You’re serious?”

“Dead serious.”

He nodded. We could take a tumble anytime. But big, juicy exorcisms were harder to come by.

Once we were clean and centered, suited up in clothes that smelled like Crash’s store, and sloshing with bland mugwort tea, we climbed into Jacob’s car and headed toward LaSalle.

I gave him Zig’s security card, and the staff didn’t bother to check the name on it against Jacob’s badge. They knew the police had been scouring the building all week, and we looked like cops. We might not have smelled like cops. But we looked the part.

My heart pounded in my throat as the elevator doors closed, and the car started to sink. “I feel like I’m buzzing,” Jacob whispered.

I shifted my focus. I did, too. “Imagine a stream of white light flowing into your pineal gland…your third eye.”

“I know what the pineal gland is.” I looked at Jacob—he had a mile-wide grin on. I glanced down. And a hard-on. If we came out of things in one piece, I’d be in for a wild ride once we got home.

“Picture yourself full of white light.”

“My God,” he said. “I’m really buzzing. For real.”

I touched his hand, and static electricity crackled between us, connecting us with a bright, brief, visible spark. It was real, all right.

The elevator doors whooshed open. The basement lobby was empty, except for the potted plastic tree and its wad of gum, which had been joined by a crunched-up drinking straw wrapper.

I was about to steer Jacob toward the old coal cellar, but he was a step ahead of me. I took a couple of long strides to catch up and take a good look at his face. Definitely in the zone—laser beam eyes. He was looking at the world with his perception shifted, and he made a beeline toward the supernatural activity without any help from me.

He stopped in front of the safety door and tugged on it. “Locked,” I told him. I pulled out my red security card and slid it through the card reader. The door clicked open, and Jacob shouldered me aside and went through first.

“Maybe I should go ahead,” I suggested to his back, “because you won’t be able to see it.”

“It got all up in your face, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Then I go first.”

He’d been listening, back in the car, when I described the fire ghost. I know he had. Because the second you say the word
ghost
, Jacob’s there, a hundred and ten percent—so he knew the spirit was freaky enough to send Bob Zigler packing. I was tempted to tell him that he wouldn’t be able to bench-press it into submission, but when Jacob set his sights on something, there wasn’t any talking him down. So instead I streamed some more white light into my pineal gland, and I gathered it up inside myself until my fingertips tingled, and I hoped that when the blowout came, I’d survive it.

Jacob strode by the dented steel door, and then stopped, cocked his head, turned back to the door and put his fingertips, spread wide, against it. “This is it, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “How do you know?”

“I can tell. I can feel it.”

I pulled a bundle of candles from my overcoat, and consulted a tiny compass that we’d plucked from my dashboard. I was happy to see it put to good use; it had certainly never helped me when I got lost driving somewhere. I held it up and saw a ball with lines and letters bobbing under a crosshair. “I can’t read this fucking thing.”

Jacob took it from me and studied it for a moment. “North,” he said. He pointed back in the direction we’d come from. He took a few paces and turned. “The walls run in cardinal directions.”

Walls in Chicago often did; that was the way the streets had been laid out.

“You sure you don’t want me to set the candles?”

Richie’s assistant had helped him set the candles, but I had the impression that I’d build a better ritual if I did it myself. I shook my head. “You’re here. That’s enough.”

Jacob opened the door and flipped on the light. The ductwork I’d crashed into on my way out of there had rolled out of its pile. It covered the floor now, like a galvanized steel obstacle course. Silent ghostfire licked the walls all around us. “She’s two-thirds of the way to the back wall, past that stack of boxes,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure why I was whispering. I had no doubt that fire ghost knew we were there.

Jacob took a ceramic ash tray that we’d cleaned in salt water from his pocket, put a black charcoal puck in the middle, then took a lighter to it. The ridge around the edge of the charcoal flamed briefly, then went out, sending a thin line of physical smoke up toward the ceiling. It smoldered for a moment, and then sparked bright orange. It gave a pop and sparked again, and pretty soon a web of twinkling orange sparks coursed through briquette as the saltpeter mixed in the charcoal caught and ignited. Once the ridge around the charcoal turned gray, Jacob took out our Baggie of copal.

“Activate it first,” I whispered, and placed my hand over his. I felt a jolt, and almost jerked back. I steeled myself against it—if we sent that charcoal flying into the heap of corrugated cardboard, we might burn the whole building down.

When I took my hand from the copal, the resin was glowing red. “Do you see that?”

“See what?”

“It’s glowing.”

Jacob scowled. “No. But I swear to God, it’s vibrating.”

I searched for a word. “Visual, verbal, what’s it called? The sense of movement.”

“Kinesthetic.”

“There you go. That must be how your brain interprets sixth-sensory vibes.”

Jacob stared into my eyes with a look that was full of wonder. Earlier, he’d figured out he could tell Carolyn a gigantic whopper without getting caught if he shielded from her first. But this? This was Major League Psych.

“Dump it on,” I told him, “and then we’ll do the sage.”

We activated the sage together, and now that I was ready for the jolt, it felt more controlled. When my hand touched Jacob’s, the white light around us flared bright. The sage continued to glow, even after the light around our hands faded. “It’s ready,” I said.

The makeshift censer billowed smoke that stunk to high heaven when we added the sage. I waved the smoke out of my eyes, and the fine hairs on the backs of my hands stood up. “Shit. It’s awake.” I pulled out the activated salt and scattered it in front of me.

Jacob backed away from me with the censer, and his gaze went to the boxes. “What now? The candles?”

I lit one, and held it out in front of me like a crucifix. It went out. Damn it. I started stepping over fallen ductwork and realized that my chances of getting past the wall of boxes with my candle lit had been slim to none, anyway. I jerked my head toward the boxes, and Jacob followed me there, surefooted, with the incense.

Ghost flames ringed the empty space beyond the box wall, burning low, maybe a couple of feet high. The crazy fire ghost stood in the center with her head slumped, as if she’d been a bad girl and was too ashamed to look up and meet anybody’s eyes. Her matted hair covered her face, and her hospital gown hung, stiff and still.

She moved, though, blips and stutters, now a couple inches closer, now a foot away. Now rotated so I saw her in perfect profile—knobby knees, spine slouched, pointy, upturned breasts. Now with her back to us, hospital gown tied sloppy, backs of her legs streaked with something dark, blood, or maybe feces.

Jacob grabbed me by the forearm and I got a white-light jolt. “Set the candles.”

“She’s, um….” I pointed to the general area of spots where she strobed in and out of sight.

“I know. I feel her. Set the candles.”

My hands shook as I tried to light the first candle, and my breath streamed out of me in a big, white plume. I glanced up. The ghost was still in the same general spot, maybe three yards away from us. I drew a mental circle around her, found north according to the walls, and  moved to set my first lit candle on the floor. Then Faun Windsong’s voice popped into my head, unbidden, parroting back some ancient wisdom about starting your circle in the east, “like the sunrise.”

Thanks, Faun.

I set the candle.

The temperature plunged. My teeth started to chatter.